Einstein the Artist

December 21st, 2011 • 10:35 PM

by Shawna Halevy

“My discovery was a result of musical perception.” -Albert Einstein

The current crisis situation in Politics and Economics, is in no way separated from the current state of the culture of society or its beliefs. Degeneration in music, theater and other social activities is what allowed for the standards of government to collapse. The moment a civilization loses sight of its true human nature, such as long term happiness for the general welfare, and a concern for the success of the species, or loses access to the greatest ideals of man, you can expect a stagnation and then a collapse of civilization. The separation of the so-called emotional side of man in art from the rational spirit in science is what started the corruption. This dichotomy was no accident. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was set up after WWII as another form of fascism or mind control, disguised as an anti-authoritarian group promoting individual expression against communism, when in fact its intention was geared toward bestial complacency and conformity, as funded by the CIA. The most effective way of doing this was cutting off a generation’s connection to their history (a heritage of hundreds of years of cultural struggle to provide a better future) and in its place, encouraging a flight from responsibility in search of the greatest amount of immediate pleasure that required the least amount of work. The contrast of picturing a member of the WWII generation building the infrastructure of our country, such as the TVA and fighting Hitler, to a stoned-hippie-flower child dancing, seeking free love, and shutting down colleges, illustrates the point. The counter-culture was a rejection of commitment to the nature of man; and in place of satisfying that emotional commitment (the internal drive to improve society) there was animal entertainment for the boomers. Music (not to mention drugs) was made and used as an escape from reality. Modern music is promoted for the same reason that drugs are pushed, to dull the minds of the population. Classical music, in contrast, is used for preparing for reality, not only that, but preparing to go beyond current reality. Classical Music is the domain that was created to nurture the geniuses and leaders that could rise above their contemporary state and live in a future era, to change their peers who were dominated by the moment. It was self-consciously developed to sharpen the perceptions of the mind and to exercise the emotion of a scientific epiphany. This medium, along with other forms of art such as painting and theater, is not determined by an era in time, as the names Baroque, Classical and Romantic imply, but by the timeless Socratic method and the intention to organize society to realize its innate potential; to develop that ability to find courage to fight against peasantry. Albert Einstein’s personality is exemplary of this purpose.

Today, the current generation taking power has been born into a counter culture. We did not have a chance to reject any structure of belief, we were simply raised to think that nothing came before us and that truth doesn’t exist. Through resuscitating our generation’s imagination, we can defeat this evil. We must return to our human culture in order to truly progress; starting by bridging the gap in generations created by the Baby Boomers, and returning classical art to the fountainhead of science.

Not long ago, it was common knowledge that our best thinkers in science were also musicians or something similar. Not too long before that it was not even considered necessary to mention the musician-scientist as a novelty, as it was a given that both realms were needed for a human being to have a balanced personality. This relationship, being taken for granted, was preyed upon from the outside until a complete divorce was accomplished. Leaving behind dysfunctional children, as typified by abstract art, shitty music, and quantum mechanics of the baby boomers. The purpose of destroying this institution has been fulfilled: people today have an inability to recognize and act on their true human nature, as different from an animal or a machine.

We must work against this intention and be ready to fight for a higher conception of man, reuniting these soul-mates, art and science, and reviving classical culture, the sanctuary of the human soul.

Case Study of Einstein and his music: a last remnant of our classical culture

To start with, we can look to our past heroes as role models.

There’s a poetic aspect to Einstein’s works that doesn’t exist in any scientific work today, which he shares generously in a most shocking and simplistic way. He has an intuitive drive to seek out the sufficient reasons in physics.

There’s been recent criticism on Einstein’s Theory, and when I started looking into it through his letters and lectures from colleagues, I found a open environment of debate; especially over General Relativity. Einstein was delighted that people took such interest in his Theory, “even if their intent is to kill it.”

The period around 1919-1921 of proving the General Theory, which took the whole modern world to accomplish, seemed to be a real struggle over scientific truth; though many of the people had bad approaches, they were still seeking for the most reasonable reality. That ended with the Solvay conference of 1927.[1]

Einstein’s and his circle’s opponents were mostly Newtonian loyalists or aetherist ideologues. But there were also many professional scientists who seemed quite offended that, after all their years of service, some guy from a patent office dared to shake their foundation of physics. Consequently, their objections were academic; picking on the math of the theory, and accusing it of not playing by the rules, much like the criticisms of today.

Some names of physicists contemporary with Einstein that had differing theories are Gustav Mie, Max Abraham, Nordstroem and Kottler. These men had already been working on their own theories of gravity, held professorships for decades, and felt as though Einstein had side stepped issues generally accepted as crucial. Some felt his novel approach would lead off into the wilderness and a more conservative approach was required. The environment was ripe for fundamental change as physics was in a crisis at the turn of the century, which Einstein consolidated. Planck’s work on quantum phenomena disturbed the reliance on the cause and effect relation of the continuum, the discovery of radiation was challenging the conservation laws, and experimentation in electro-magnetism threw Newton’s action at a distance postulates into the waste basket. Mie, being a materialist, was trying to develop General Relativity from the standpoint of a comprehensive theory of matter, missing the point of Special Relativity, which smashed all previous conceptions of the tangible universe.[2]

How did Einstein, out of all these other competent scientists who had the same, or perhaps more, access to the data, discover The Theory of Relativity?

Why is it that Einstein thought so originally, as exemplified by his thought experiments, and had a sound epistemological method, and others who were bright, were nonetheless held down by their formulaic beliefs?

The answer must be: his music. Even though others may have played music as Einstein did, Einstein did not just have music as a recreation: he thought as a creative artist would. This difference in thinking is what enabled Einstein to make breakthroughs in science in seeing the world through the eyes of a creator.

Let us quickly review the less known side of Einstein. First, from his childhood:

Einstein’s mother Pauline “had talent and liked to perform piano duets with engineers from her husband’s factory. Einstein showed an early aptitude, starting to learn the violin at the age of five. By his own account his progress was only workmanlike until about thirteen, but he persisted, with his mother acting as eager accompanist at the keyboard.”[3][4]It was the discovery of Mozart’s sonatas that inspired Einstein to keep playing. “I took violin lessons from age six to fourteen, but had no luck with my teachers, for whom music did not transcend mechanical practicing. I really began to learn only when I was about thirteen years old, mainly after I had fallen in love with Mozart’s sonatas. The attempt to reproduce, to some extent, their artistic content and their singular grace compelled me to improve my technique, which improvement I obtained from these sonatas without practicing systematically. I believe, on the whole, that love is a better teacher than sense of duty – with me, at least, it certainly was. It is in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom, without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by coercion and a sense of duty.” [5]

Later “At age sixteen Einstein had an epiphany in the school cafeteria at Aarau. Reflecting on Bismarck’s famous line that ’beer makes one stupid and lazy.’ Einstein vowed that he would be a theoretical physicist and henceforth become intoxicated instead on physics and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. To celebrate, he invited his friend Hans Byland to accompany him on the piano in a Mozart sonata. What happened next, Byland never forgot: ’When his violin began to sing, the walls of the room seemed to recede—for the first time Mozart in all his purity appeared before me, bathed in Hellenic beauty with its pure lines, roguishly playful, mightily sublime.’”[6] The Gestalt Psychologist, fellow musician, and friend of Einstein, Max Wertheimer reports that it was also around this age that Einstein started grappling with the famous questions on light, that led, seven years later, to his discovery of Special Relativity.[7]

Einstein’s thoughts on different composers and who he admired was well known: “Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe itself...like all great beauty, his music was pure simplicity.”[8]

“Einstein preferred the highly structured, deterministic music of Bach and Mozart. He imagined Mozart plucking melodies out of the air as if they were ever present in the universe, and he thought of himself as working like Mozart, not merely spinning theories but responding to Nature, in tune with the cosmos. To an insistent reporter asking his opinion of Bach, Einstein replied brusquely, ’This is what I have to say about Bach’s life work: listen, play, love, revere-- and keep your mouth shut.’ He found Handel interesting but somewhat shallow; some of Brahms he considered significant, ’but most of his works have for me no inner persuasiveness;’ he thought Richard Strauss gifted but ’concerned only with outside effects;’ and Debussy was ’delicately colorful but shows a poverty of structure.’ After a performance at the Bern Opera, in 1908, of Richard Wagner’s Goetterdaemmerung, Einstein commented to his companion, ’Wagner is, God forgive me, not to my taste.’”

His dislike for Wagner was especially known:

“I admire Wagner’s inventiveness, but I see his lack of architectural structure as decadence. Moreover, to me his musical personality is indescribably offensive so that for the most part I can listen to him only with disgust.” Einstein also admired Schubert for his “superlative ability to express emotion.”One opinion sticks out as odd on Beethoven:

Not only was Einstein spiritually connected to the great composers of the past, but physically he was in contact with the generation of students and followers of the last of the eminent musicians. Einstein had the chance as a teenager, to see the famous violinist Joseph Joachim in Aarau, for which he studied the Brahms G-major violin sonata that was going to be performed. Joseph was the collaborator of the revolutionary circles of Felix Mendelssohn, Brahms, and the Schumanns.[10][11] Later Einstein had a mutual friend of Joachim with Planck[12], this being the best example out of the collection of well known musicians that were in Einstein’s intimate circle.

From Einstein’s sharp critiques of Wagner, you see that it’s not just any music that can stimulate human creativity. What’s required is an art created by geniuses for the purpose of engaging the mind, to recreate ideas, instead of going for effects. Therefore, it’s no wonder we lack creative thinkers like Einstein today, given the terrible state of music and culture. More important than asking ’Did Einstein like the right people?’ would be, ’What was it about the composer’s method which he appreciated and used?’ The answer to which is reflected in his thoughts about Mozart.

How does the beauty of classical music work on your subconscious?

He called his violin “my old friend, through whom I say and I sing to myself all that which I often do not admit myself at all, but which at best makes me laugh when I see it in others.”

How does it develop an intuitive sense?

“In music, as in physics, Einstein was never satisfied with mere technique; instead, he sought in both rhapsodic pleasure from an underlying harmony. His long hours in Weber’s laboratory, like his music lessons, sensitized Einstein to the delicacy of instruments in general, to the beauty and harmony that they could create, when properly used, and to the importance of caring for one’s instrument. This sensitivity to precision instruments and their use in assessing theory against physical reality is one of the principal features of the young Einstein’s writings.”[13] This adds a dimension to the use of instrumentation when investigating the universe; in art, we also use our instruments, but not only do we respond to the effect produced by the instrument, to get a picture of the reality outside us, we create it![14]

The function of the imagination:

an organized structure for freedom

One could superficially ask, how directly was Einstein’s work tied into his music? His second wife tells us in a letter, “Music helps him when he is thinking about his theories. He goes to his study, comes back, strikes a few chords on the piano, jots something down, returns to his study.” This reminds me of Plato’s conception of recollection and innate ideas; the answer to a paradox exists nowhere but within yourself. You let your mind work to get an idea and you find it inside yourself. “He had his music. But this, as he would explain on occasions, was in some ways an extension of his thinking processes, a method of allowing the subconscious to solve particularly tricky problems...He would often play his violin in his kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems. Then, suddenly, in the middle of playing, he would announce excitedly, ’I’ve got it!’ As if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of music...Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties.” [16] Einstein’s violin is no magic wand. Art distills the world of experience into its essential nature, leaving out all the accidents and limits of the material, leaving behind the actual substance of reality. This is what we’re trying to obtain in physics. The reason why a thought process can be carried over from one realm to another (art to science) is because both realms are governed by the same universal principle of creativity.

An account of Einstein from his violinist and teacher friend Suzuki[17] presents it more clearly:

“[My discovery of Special Relativity] occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.” Intuition is a subtle aspect of human work; though it plays such an important part. People who demand a complete practical or logical demonstration for something for it to be accepted, eliminate actual human science. True this necessary discontinuity in thought needs to be educated and disciplined, but Einstein promotes the intuitive imagination as crucial.

“I believe in the brotherhood of man and the uniqueness of the individual. But if you ask me to prove what I believe, I can’t. You know them to be true but you could spend a whole lifetime without being able to prove them. The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a leap – call it intuition or what you will – and comes out upon a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.”

Sylvester: “If we owe so little to the experience of others, how do you account for sudden leaps forward in the sphere of science? Do you ascribe your own discoveries to intuition or inspiration?”

Einstein: “I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.”

S: “Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?”

E: “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”[18]

The element of play as exercised in music is seen as central to Einstein’s character as told by his son:

“As a matter of fact, he always liked to improvise things of that sort, just as he would also like to improvise in his work in a way: for instance, when he had to give a talk he never knew ahead of time exactly what he was going to say. It would depend on the impression he got from the audience in which way he would express himself and into how much detail he would go. And so this improvisation was a very important part of his character and of his way of working. In other respects he had a character more like that of an artist than of a scientist as we usually think of them. For instance, the highest praise for a good theory or a good piece of work was not that it was correct nor that it was exact but that it was beautiful.”[19]

The Aesthetical Principle

The impulse to search for symmetry and to delight in the beauty of a figure is recognized as natural, when looking at flowers or other pastoral scenes; but to use this as a method in physics in choosing a theory or hypothesis seems strange to us. Yet this was exactly the way Einstein operated.

“One feels a great aesthetic pleasure when working. Even in mathematical figures one is looking for harmony, and it seems to me that harmony is the equivalent of beauty and of pleasure. The intellectual pleasure is closely related to the aesthetic one. As a rule, one’s work is prompted by curiosity and a certain obsession which cannot always be fully explained...Music and physical research work originate in different sources, but they are interrelated through their common aim, which is the desire to express the unknown. Their reactions are different, but their results are supplementary. As to artistic and scientific creation, I hold with Schopenhauer that their strongest motive is the desire to leave behind the rawness and monotony of everyday life, so as to take refuge in a world crowed with the images of our own creation...The further we proceed, the more formidable are the riddles facing us. Yet I’m no pessimist. Let us always remember that beauty is also truth.”

Even though intuition and improvisation are central to Einstein’s work as a catalyst, he doesn’t use them as a complete formula; there’s much passion and rigor required to follow through on an idea. Einstein points out that this ’seeking the beauty of a thing’ involves ’infinitely exhausting work’ as well.

“You see, ultimately even the work of the scholarly researcher comes to fruition in the field of the imagination. When I think back, how my discoveries came about and took shape! A hundred times one runs into a brick wall, to try hold onto, define something, which is an unclear feeling, floating before you, to bring it into a system, in short, to reach the last summit. In vain. And then, at another time, perhaps like a flash, the resolving thought; and then begins the infinitely exhausting work of constructing and developing the system. This is no different from what happens to an artist. Concentration, extended will-power, years of endurance create a work. That is the temperament required. Because mere intuition does not suffice. Artistic premonition plays a not insignificant role in my life...If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my day dreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”[20]

An account of a close relative tells us: “He works like an artist, First he sees the outlines, you may say the vision, of a great thought, and then he sets to work to substantiate it, to give it body and soul.” Working like an artist is not characterized by outward tendencies, but by the inner drive to seek and operate on the truth and reason that the craftsman of the world used.

The biographers who provide these different quotes, all try to tag Einstein’s work with music as some sort of therapeutic retreat, to deal with emotions like a Boomer, instead of, what I think is fair to say, a religious practice; searching for God and investigating his creation- not just beauty and harmony in itself, but the human mind. Einstein was participating in being human, exploring other composer’s creativity, as well as his own and bringing that expression to others in the string quartets he played in.[21] Music is the study of the universe as it is reflected in God’s creation, man’s mind.

“He merely insists upon the right to play because, as he says, ’I feel the creative process in the composer...I personally feel the highest possible degree of happiness through great works of art. From them I receive spiritual gifts of such strength as I cannot receive from other things...It is the ethical impression, the ethical elevation, the ethical satisfaction which I conceive in an incomparable way when the work of art radiates at me.’...Music continued to beguile Einstein. It was not so much an escape as it was a connection: to the harmony underlying the universe, to the creative genius of the great composers, and to other people who felt comfortable bonding with more than just words. He was awed, both in music and in physics, by the beauty of harmonies.”[22]

Conclusion

There is a very clear unfolding of the universe in its striving and continual progress towards perfection, to express more and more of its potential; as so succinctly expressed by Einstein’s saying, ’the universe is finite, yet unbounded.’ The material of the Becoming is constantly evolving towards the Being, which will never be obtained as a fixed destination would.

This is also true for the finite individual identity, which strives for the infinite divine. Even though our personal condition is always changing, (our moods and opinions etc...) there is something unchanging, a unity, which allows us to refer to ourselves as the same personality, our I, because of the internal one we’re always improving towards. This can be seen when looking over the entirety of Einstein’s life. Biographers are perplexed by the account of Einstein’s changed appreciation of Beethoven:

“After his colleagues updated, as a seventy-fifth birthday gift, the music system they had given him five years earlier, Einstein began repeatedly to play an RCA Victor recording of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. It was an unusual choice for two reasons. He tended to regard Beethoven, who was not his favorite composer, as ’too personal, almost naked.’ Also, his religious instincts did not usually include these sorts of trappings.”

For me, this is not a mystery. Einstein developed. He didn’t just make a breakthrough in 1905 and quit there; he continually worked to improve his thinking. The two characters of Beethoven and Einstein are very similar. Both were popularly perceived as being introverted, but in actuality they each had a great passion of doing the good for humanity. Both men were very spiritual, though they didn’t adhere to any particular dogma. Hence, why Einstein found Beethoven ’too personal.’ Then it is clear why Einstein had to evolve his mind to the point where he no longer needed ’a running start’ to listen to Beethoven, and could reach Beethoven’s matured state.[24]

When looking at the different paradoxes Einstein had dealt with in working with Relativity, you’ll see how poetry must supersede mathematics. What the scientific community that was working on Relativity was lacking, was a living mind, the mind of a creator or of an artist.

A culture consciously organized for society should be based on the same principles we find in the world and in mind. This is the case with a classical culture and music, where you have a continuous changing of the parts, to better fulfill its higher (unchanging in a sense) unity; a self-creating culture. Culture acts as a medium between the individual and the world outside them, resolving part and the whole into the same substance of truth.

“The big political doings of our time are so disheartening that in our generation one feels quite alone. It is as if people had lost the passion for justice and dignity and no longer treasured what better generations have won by extraordinary sacrifices...But Mozart remains as beautiful and tender as he always was and always will be. There is, after all, something eternal that lies beyond reach of the hand of fate and of all human delusions.” – Einstein

You can see that a culture of an adult civilization is more than just a genre of style or taste. To simply delight in the sensuously beautiful will actually get you stuck in a romantic passiveness, and you will use music for comfort. In being challenged by sublime art, music puts you in a state to fulfill an inner demand for a better world. It puts you in an active, potent attitude, based on your creative nature, from which you find internal strength. This is much different from an enraged mob at a rock concert. Science, and the rest of a modern society, cannot survive without beautiful art.

The lineage and power of classical culture has been purposefully obscured to keep us as cattle, by the oligarchy, a class of people who do not believe that all men are created equal. More effective than physical force, ignorance and ugly pessimism is the main weapon for slavery; if you kill the passion for truth and destroy the imagination of a people, all of a sudden they are no longer able to think and defend themselves. Classical culture, on the other hand, was created and developed over generations to counter this evil operation against mankind. Through this environment the imagination of a creative individual is able to leap to new conceptions by free play, to solve problems that logically had no solution. This is the process of lawfully revolutionizing the current conceived world picture and man’s interaction with it, by reaching a higher state, above the senses, where reality presides. In a beautiful culture you find a source of love for mankind in recognizing their purpose and creative worth, through discovering this within yourself; you find a passion for life and compassion for the world as a whole. Without this ability to create new conceptions or states of mind and to be put into a state of passion, there’s no motivation or confidence to drive for the future. The beauty that is so moving it is uncomfortable (as opposed to the romantic pretty things that make you feel good) is only found in classical art. This emotion, created by the experience of a classical work, is very mixed; there’s the melancholy of seeing clearly the mortality of the individual, which is enveloped by the optimism that their ideas and influence live on. This complex emotion is starkly different from the superficial pursuit of banal pleasure and the avoidance of pain we find in modern entertainment.[25] Classical art uplifts and inspires, and challenges you to change, to always do more to unfold your purpose in life, through your imagination. The imagination is where you can answer the question of morality: ’Are you capable of acting and contributing something beyond your physical existence?’ This is the question of immortality of the human soul; as opposed to the fame that gets glamorized in the mass cult of popular culture today.

To think that these aspects of art don’t have everything to do with critical thinking or having rigorous reasoning capabilities, as in science and politics, is wholly ignorant. The ultimate destruction of culture came with Liberalism; the acceptance that there are no true principles or if there were, we can’t know them. The burning of the bridge between art and science is the road block in returning to a healthy, productive culture. Realizing this and re-synthesizing the human soul and mind in society will be as a cultural Glass-Steagall; a first step to a global recovery in reclaiming our willful role in the evolution of the universe. Humanity has to adopt its own cause based on principles which adhere to human nature. The population is ready for leadership, and is ready to be inspired by beautiful truth, which is the only thing that can resonates with man. It’s time to become fully conscious members of our Republic.

Endnotes:

From the Berlin Journal Menschen,

“The common element in artistic and scientific experience“

by Albert Einstein

Published February 1921

What do artistic and scientific experience have in common? Where the world ceases to be the scene of personal hopes, wishes, wants, where we face it as free creatures, admiring, questioning, beholding, there we enter the realm of art and science. We do science when we reconstruct in the language of logic what we have seen and experienced; but when we communicate through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind, yet we intuitively recognize them as something meaningful--then we are doing art. Common to both is the loving devotion, the being above the personal, removed from our will.

In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates goes through how true knowledge is impossible to obtain through the senses, therefore reality is know to us through the soul (maybe we can call this now the creative imagination) which, hence, is eternal with and operates on the same principles as the universe. “Then before we began to see or hear or perceive in any way, we must have had a knowledge of absolute equality, or we could not have referred to that the equals which are derived from the senses-for to that they all aspire, and of that they fall short?
That, Socrates, is certainly to be inferred from the previous statements.
And did we not see and hear and acquire our other senses as soon as we were born?
Certainly.
Then we must have acquired the knowledge of the ideal equal at some time previous to this?
Yes.
That is to say, before we were born, I suppose?
True.
And if we acquired this knowledge before we were born, and were born having it, then we also knew before we were born and at the instant of birth not only equal or the greater or the less, but all other ideas; for we are not speaking only of equality absolute, but of beauty, goodness, justice, holiness, and all which we stamp with the name of essence in the dialectical process, when we ask and answer questions. Of all this we may certainly affirm that we acquired the knowledge before birth?
That is true.
But if, after having acquired, we have not forgotten that which we acquired, then we must always have been born with knowledge, and shall always continue to know as long as life lasts-for knowing is the acquiring and retaining knowledge and not forgetting. Is not forgetting, Simmias, just the losing of knowledge?
Quite true, Socrates.
But if the knowledge which we acquired before birth was lost by us at birth, and afterwards by the use of the senses we recovered that which we previously knew, will not that which we call learning be a process of recovering our knowledge, and may not this be rightly termed recollection by us?
Very true.
For this is clear, that when we perceived something, either by the help of sight or hearing, or some other sense, there was no difficulty in receiving from this a conception of some other thing like or unlike which had been forgotten and which was associated with this; and therefore, as I was saying, one of two alternatives follows: either we had this knowledge at birth, and continued to know through life; or, after birth, those who are said to learn only remember, and learning is recollection only.
Yes, that is quite true, Socrates.” There's also an excellent demonstration of this concept in Plato's Meno.

ii.)

This is the same way the vision of a musical piece organizes the dead parts (the written notes) to move and embody an idea. “The artistic process that has as its starting point the unity of the whole, rests on the concept of a more-or-less complete vision of that whole. For the artist at work – work being, in this context, not a state, a condition, but a dynamic activity of struggle and victory – this vision is the goal he seeks to attain; the star that, unbeknown to him, guides his steps through the maze of obstacles and temptations that beset his path and shows him how to unite the forces at his command. Only at the end of the journey, therefore, will the vision emerge in its totality, not only for the listener, the receiver of the work of art, but also – and this is a vital point – for the composer, the creative artist himself. The total vision only achieves its full radiance when it merges with all the individual sources of light from within the work, the over-all and the particular interacting and stimulating each other. It is not that the vision is present, ready-made, from the beginning and is only waiting to be filled with artistic substance. On the contrary: the joy that the artist feels comes not from possessing the vision but from the activity of turning it into reality. ..It is not that the material seeks the appropriate vision on its own account, but that the vision seeks the material for its complete expression. ... every complex of material forces is in the last analysis only a means towards the realization of a vision, the creation of a living world, which is the sole purpose of all artistic activity.” Wilhelm Furtwangler, Contemporary Thoughts of a Musician.”

Footnotes

2 What we consider most real according to our senses and everyday experience is shown by Einstein to be continually changing as mere shadows, and that the only “things” which have an invariant quality, are the invisible physical principles of the universe. Think of Plato’s cave parable in providing an analogy of Being and Becoming. See the authors video: http://www.larouchepac.com/node/15482[5]

3The Private Lives of Albert Einstein By Roger Highfield, Paul Carter

4 “ One student, by name of Einstein, even sparkled by rendering an adagio from a Beethoven sonata with deep understanding.” Inspector’s report on a music examination, Aargau Kantonsschule, March 31 1896.

7 Max Wertheimer, Productive Thinking. An example of his thought experiment demonstrating the paradox of relative velocity and the constancy of the speed of light: “What if one were to run after a ray of light? What if one were riding on the beam? If one were to run after a ray of light as it travels, would its velocity thereby be decreased? If one were to run fast enough, would it no longer move at all?”

8The Private Albert Einstein by Peter A. Bucky

9The Etude, January, 1947

A Musical Visit With Einstein

by Lili Foldes

“The professor explained that he had found these works many years ago in a music library in Berlin, and immediately took to liking them They were works of two Italian and two German master of the eighteenth century; sonatas by Tartini, Corelli, Biber and a romantic sonata by Bach, familiar only to the connoisseurs of musical rarities.

Einstein was happy as a child seeing that a professional musician, a concert artist, was satisfied with his fiddling. He looked even gayer and more refreshed after an hour and a half of playing than before.”

Also from Frederick Schiller’s Aesthetical letters, number 13: “ The more diversely the receptivity [for sensuousness] develops, the more variable it is, it offers more points of contact to phenomena, thus man apprehends the world much more, and develops more faculties in himself. The more power and depth the personality gains, the more reason gains freedom, so much more man comprehends the world, thus the more form he creates out of himself. Therefore his culture will consist in two things, first: in procuring for the receptive powers the most diverse contacts with the world, and to render sensations as passive as possible; secondly, to acquire for the will the highest independence from the senses, and, to push reason’s activity to its maximum. Where both qualities unite, man will combine the greatest fullness of existence with the greatest independence and freedom. And, instead of abandoning himself to the world, he will rather draw it into himself with the whole infinity of its phenomena, and subject it to the unity of his reason. To summarize: only in so far as he is independent, is reality outside him, is he receptive to it; only in so far as he is receptive, is reality in him, is he a thinking power.“

21 In fact, this is exactly the steps Kepler took in discovering gravity as a dynamic system governing the interrelations of the planets in his Harmonies of the World.

22 Banesh Hoffman, The Human Side et al.

24 “There is nothing higher than to approach the Godhead more nearly than other mortals and by means of that contact to spread the rays of the Godhead through the human race.” -Beethoven.

“I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.” -Einstein

Furtwaengler considered Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, for which Beethoven wrote the inscription ’From the heart, to the heart’ so great that he thought it was virtually unperformable.

25 “It seems to me that in our time we do not sufficiently appreciate the significance of an active participation in music as a means of development and of finding true happiness. A constant activity in music will contribute much toward the building up of a well-rounded character and enriching of the soul because of the possibility afforded by it to explore and relive depths of emotions.” – Einstein.